It’s a hollow morning, [sic] mourning. A night of dark dreams where Jae behaves as the Jae of now, not the Jae I knew. The one who recently implied that there was an email dialogue that she wouldn’t react in anger to. This is another fiction, as the emails in the last year which were not motivated by anger… just family issues, went ignored like everything else. I didn't expect or require responses but Christ, her lies spread across her words like Irish butter. I should stop being shocked. I want to stop being shocked by what a terrifying dishonest person she has become. It is difficult.
I believed she would behave humanely toward my cousin, mother, and her once-close friend who almost died. Oddly, they did too. Why did I think that? Jae-now, is smug, diffident, and dishonest almost constantly. I’m not sure I can understand the point of the dishonesty. I cannot understand the effort. I cannot understand Jae-now.
I was surprised by the collection of reactions I received when I relayed her marriage… which occurred so long ago. I could hear the tender shock in Gerry and my mother and cousin’s voices. My mother and cousin specifically became speechless. It surprised me. I thought I was the only one who could be hurt by this. It was nice to feel less alone. It was nice to hear the shock of others. I’m not sure it helped me heal from it though.
I emailed her to be ignored. I emailed her to shock her about how she still invades my reality in unwelcome, painful movements. I felt so sad and overwhelmed by who she is now.
I email her to say, was any of it true? Did we have meaning to speak of? Does her avid depiction of me as one worth being avidly avoided synch with someone who felt anything for me other than a delusion? It is confusing. But I had no interest in interacting with her, more than she knows. I had no belief she would respond, much less so dishonestly.
And Christ, why tell me SO DISHONESTLY there is a type of communication you would respond to, when you blatantly ignored the familial things that happened. I responded very kindly because I didn’t want to participate in her portrait. Her lies. It was my message in a bottle. I’m fairly indifferent to where it went. It was for me to say:
“I’m not this thing you want others, and yourself, to believe I am. I am not this thing. I am me and I loved you and you lied to me and others so easily. I am not this thing. Please stop ‘thinging’ me because it makes you feel better. I don’t want you to email me. I wanted you to know that your lies still echo across the plains and fly up the walls of the canyon where I crouch. I wanted to tell you that I see you and then you try to make me feel small and horrible... because I see you and the horrid sad half-life you extract from wounding me. In return I give you all the kindness I have in order that the echoes might stop.”
In my dream we discuss our conflict in the entryway of boutique/vintage shops filled with colorful objects. One emphasizes Halloween (not a surprise from my psyche of Halloween love). Finally, I wake and move to my bed only to be re-trapped into this dream dialogue where we stand in the entry way of some shop.
Shops next door to each other. They are old grand houses, lush and New England. She tells me of her relationship with “Jade” and indicates it is someone I once knew. The dream creates a reference to a supple, tattooed, yoga-clothing-clad woman (whom I did not know and is not her partner). I see moments of this woman watching me dismissively, as a target, when I sat behind the practice’s desk. I am focused on as disposable. Jade represents what our knitted psyches define as "better than Meg."
She preens happily about their relationship without meaning or depth. The energy is sex, which is Jae’s harm point. Something she always craved but hardly wanted when she could have all of it. My heart caves in during the interaction and she makes all statements to me as if I’m not there. I am barely acknowledged or looked at. I keep looking for ways to get out of her presence, and the dream itself, unsuccessfully.
In dreams, as in life, I want her erased. I admit it. I feel as if I have tolerated her fatuous, egotistical ghost for as long as I can. She is such a mediocre, angry ghost. Accusing me of anger, when anger drove her entire enterprise to hurt me. Without recourse she created an absurd defensive portrait of me the villain and her the victim. She needed it. She’s been creating that model with other human beings her whole life to drive change, much more so than I. But I don’t know how to forgive the aftermath and all the lying. I don’t know how to get a toehold while she is this dismissive arrogant monster. Still.
And I know her hasty remarriage shouldn’t hurt me. Her attitudes and behavior have been incautious and thoughtless on so many levels. Her repressed recovery will be filled with repercussions that I’ll never know… as it has been always between her and her family. I don’t mean that unkindly, but she is a child of parents who specialized in divorce and infidelity. She walked from a 15 year marriage immediately into another marriage. Even a vague appraisal of the model has psychological realities.
However functional her material delights and connections, she lies to herself constantly. She lied to others and herself about me. I know that now. It hurts all over that I gave 15 years to someone who is like this. But I know what I know. The cult. The marriage. There is a dead end. I will have agony, but I don’t thrive in Jae’s troubling cul-de-sacs. I know that. But it is agony to be told that I am so small. That I mean so little. But that’s what her parents told me constantly. So I know where she learned it.
Perez once told me I’d make a terrible lawyer because of my personality. As if there were only type of lawyer and one way to be useful to a law firm. As if a corporate contracts lawyer knew all about the law world. As if I wasn’t better at finding the crux of a successful argument than he was. As if I couldn’t write a better amicus brief than he could ever imagine. As if my research abilities didn’t have a vastness and interpretive quality that set me quite apart. As if my "personality" didn't endow me with a million gifts he could only wish for.
After Perez’s wife’s novel failed continually to find a buyer (and no thought was given to finding an agent because he actively discussed her as intellectually beneath him) he said to me, “If I had set to write a book, it would get published.” While holding her hostage to the limitations of a psychologically traumatized Stepford Wife, he claimed if he wrote a book, he would get it published. And better he might do, hiring an agent and lawyer to help him on his journey. But those resources were not juried for her. Later he admitted, it would be easier for him if she just settled into her menial retirement, continuing to be the depressed, unsatisfied wife that he reviled and subordinated. Arrogant and alone, he hoses down the over-heated beast of burden and believes he has done his best. An animal that doesn't entirely do all the things he purchased it for but is too expensive to retire and replace.
Never fear Perez, I won’t practice law among your monied whores. I love the philosophy of the law too much and I'm too lost and curious to care for your picture of the world. Your determined judgements of what make other people less than you are ludicrous and baseless. Jae and Perez’s silver childhoods make them think it is morally okay to hold other people hostage to what they want. I know that now. I was the Elizabeth who left. I was the spiritual divergence. I know that.
But it still hurts to be talked down to by a family so universally morally debased. It hurts that she became, or always was, every horrible thing their behavior determined so early. It hurts that she was always them and she goes all over the earth pretending she isn’t. It hurts that she gets confidence in her victim-hood. That wounding me with dishonestly and anger was justified more than my reaction to it. It hurts that she is them and I let her have my whole heart.
I await the conversion of all of this into something positive. I know it will be. As it is, I no longer live among her disingenuous nature and easy lies. As it is, I should be grateful. Ultimately, I paid a small price to never be an Ehrich, even a little bit. I was never a proper beast of burden. I see she has one now. Women who marry Ehrichs are not partners but misbehaving children who will be punished severely for insubordination.
Names and money do not make you a more valuable member of the human race, Perez. When you claimed the inherent “chassis” of your vehicle was more sophisticated than your wife’s, you sounded an idiotic eugenic fool. You sounded as irrelevant and stupid as a Nazi, yet you came from Jewish lines. Terming your “chassis” that of a “Ferrari,” you were about to drift into some more analogous idiocy to punish your wife for choosing you, and I cut you off. I noted the marks of sophistication that existed in her family and you dismissed as nepotism and general ambitious ass-kissing. You my cowardly former friend, are from generations of wealthy German Jews, some who worked in the White House, and believe yourself some maverick individual. You are a mockery all through.
It has come to my attention, that while she may differ from you a bit, you made your daughter one who lacks truth and compassion, just like you. And it hurts. It hurts foul fellows, that I was so blind.
